It is known to use walls to reduce hazards and noise from busy highways and other roadways. Precast panels may be used as walls and may be lowered into slots formed in H-shaped posts. The H-shaped posts may be attached to footings, mechanically, or may be inserted into holes in the ground that are filled with grout. If the latter, then the posts must be held in position by a jig to ensure that the posts are vertical, aligned with each other and spaced correctly to accommodate the wall panel. This requires careful setup, extra steps, extra time for setting up the grout before removing the jig and a volume of grout that fills the hole, when the hole is drilled, without the post even being inserted, yet, all of which is time consuming and wasteful of materials.
U.S. Pub. No. 2005/0120644 discloses a precast, post-tensioned segmental pole, which does nothing to solve the problems of time consuming installation and wasteful use of grout.
U.S. Pub. No. 2005/0252124 discloses a post anchoring device that anchors a post to a foundation surface, such as a slab or footing, such as a cast in place slab or foundation.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,689,927 discloses poured concrete footings with closed loop reinforcing rods arrayed around a depression in which sound barrier posts are inserted and grouted using fast setting grout. While this reduces the time for installing the posts, after the footings are poured, it does nothing to reduce the wasteful use of concrete in the poured footing. Also, the overall time is still quite long, because the footings must be precisely poured and must be allowed to set before the posts are grouted into the depressions surrounded by closed loop reinforcements. The drawings of FIGS. 3 and 4 provide an example of noise walls inserted in H-shaped posts extending above the surface of the ground.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,806,262 discloses a partial poured footing that is mechanically fastened to the bottom of a post before the remainder of a footing is poured. This reduces the time to install the posts and gives some flexibility in plumbing the posts before pouring the remaining portion of the footing, but it requires additional steps and more time for the setting up of the partial footing and then the remaining footing.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,887,691 discloses a post-tensioning cable system used in a post mounted in poured footing. After attaching the post by the post-tensioning cable system, grout is poured to fill voids. Again, this adds steps and requires time for both the footing to set up and for the grout in the voids to set up. While this adds a tensioning cable, it does not solve the wasteful use of materials or the wasted time setting the concrete footing and setting the post in grout. FIGS. 1-3 illustrate another example of an H-shaped post and wall panel system.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,605,090 illustrates another example of an H-shaped post and noise barrier panel system that is capable of following contours in the terrain.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,617,028 illustrates yet another example of H-shaped posts and panels, which may be decorative in this example.
In all of the examples, the steps required to position and anchor the posts result in extra labor, materials and time in order to install wall panels retained by the retaining posts. The need to precisely space the posts and to accurately plumb the posts makes pouring and setting up footings tricky.